At any given moment, Collin Faunce can see exactly how much energy he’s using in his house. When he turns on the dishwasher, his consumption spikes on the colorful head-up display on his computer monitor. If he and his wife, Erica, set the air conditioning just a few degrees higher, they can watch the dollars spared tick upwards in real time. They don’t have to wait for the monthly bill to understand their savings, and when a gadget siphons away precious energy, the Faunces can immediately identify the culprit.

“After about a week or two [of using the program], I could figure out which appliances were using how much energy and kind of plan accordingly after that,” said Faunce.

Welcome to our gamified future: where energy efficiency competes with Foursquare and Angry Birds for your attention. Winning brings badges and high scores, but it also translates into money saved for the consumer and a smarter grid for everyone.

The Faunces got the display last year when they entered a program hosted by San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) to encourage people to cut down on energy consumption. The utility partnered with Boulder, Colo.-based startup Simple Energy to motivate residents by making a competitive game out of it, complete with prizes.

“You could tell what position you were in relative to everyone else — you could determine if you were going to catch them and pass them,” said Faunce.

Simple Energy develops websites and apps that allow consumers to track their energy usage in real time and compete with each other (or themselves) to reduce it. The contest the Faunces won, Biggest Energy Saver, was actually a pilot program in San Diego that proved social gaming applications can help consumers earn an average energy savings of 20 percent — up to 50 percent for top users.

#Winning (at energy efficiency). (Photo by Michele Ficara Manganelli.)

But the energy and cost savings didn’t end when the competition did. “People thought we were going to revert back, but we’re actually saving more and more as time goes on,” Faunce said.

Here’s an oversimplified description of how it works: Simple Energy gets consumer usage data from electric utilities and funnels that through its servers into the mobile and desktop programs it designs. All you need is a computer or smartphone: Once you sign up, your online account or mobile phone app can tell you how much energy you’ve used in the last hour, day, month, etc.

“You don’t actually have to do anything — other than save energy,” said Simple Energy co-founder and CEO Yoav Lurie. “Even if you never come back, you’re still playing.”

If your friends join, you can monitor how you’ve performed against them, too. If you’re using less energy, you’ll score more points and beat them out. As a reward, you can earn badges (a la Foursquare) for reaching certain benchmarks or demonstrating feats of energy-saving skill: How often can you halve your energy use? For how many days in a row?

Lurie thinks the concept is a no-brainer. He points to people struggling to stay healthy: We all know what health-positive habits are good for us, but does everyone get enough exercise and eat right all the time? Both research and anecdotal evidence back up the idea that competition — be it a points system to control your eating habits or finding a workout buddy — make long-term health goals easier to attain. It’s the same with energy efficiency: A lot of people think it’s a good idea to save more energy, it’s just inconvenient or a hassle to do so.

“We’ve always relied on gamification,” Lurie said. “Now it’s just getting more complicated.”

Lurie says utilities nationwide are eager to work with Simple Energy: Some have state-mandated efficiency goals to meet, while others hope to combat energy-use spikes that imperil the stability of the grid, leading to brownouts and blackouts that neither customers nor utilities want to suffer through. So it’s in the utilities’ interest to figure out how they can effectively encourage customers to reduce their energy use and try especially hard to cut back on high-demand days (common in the current nationwide inferno we call “summer 2012″).

Eyes on the prize: Some utilities reward ultra-efficient consumers with iPads or cash grants for nearby schools. Click to embiggen.

Some utilities already promote efficiency directly to customers in messages printed on monthly bills, but those aren’t exactly game-changing tactics. Behavioral change requires an effective communication to an engaged audience, and let’s face it: Nobody wants to spend more time talking with their utility than they have to.

“Most utilities don’t have a mechanism for telling customers to lower their A/C,” said Lurie. “Who follows their utility on Twitter?”

This summer, SDG&E enlisted Simple Energy to run the San Diego Energy Challenge: Residents can compete in reducing their energy use to win prizes like gift cards and tablet computers. But the biggest winner will be local schools: When residents sign up for the contest (which is jointly funded by SDG&E and the U.S. Department of Energy) they choose a middle school to earn points for. In the end, the three middle schools with the greatest savings will split a $30,000 cash grant.

Erin Coller, SDG&E communications manager, said while the company runs its own programs promoting efficiency, Simple Energy’s approach is good at getting people actually excited about it.

“It’s not something that’s really top of mind on a regular basis,” she said. The networking and gaming platforms really “increase the level of enthusiasm that people have about their energy use.”

Simple Energy (which also has a program with beleaguered Pepco in the D.C. area) is not the only company using social networking and gamification to promote energy efficiency.

This spring, Opower launched a Facebook app to let friends compare their energy use. Both companies are integrating Green Button data, an industry-led initiative (albeit at the request of the White House) launched in March to increase consumers’ access to data about their own energy use. Using it involves clicking an actual “green button” on utilities’ websites.

Green buttons are hardly riveting, but other energy efficiency startups are employing more distinctive and even whimsical approaches. Leafully, the Grand Prize winner in the DOE’s Apps for Energy challenge, translates energy consumption into carbon impact units anyone can relate to: number of trees purifying the air or number of farting cows in a month, for example. The idea is to make it easy for anyone, regardless of age or maturity level, to understand and have fun with energy consumption.

Gamification is quite the buzzword these days, so is this all a passing fad? It’s possible. But for Simple Energy and potentially Opower, gamification seems like the easiest way to get people to do something they already want to do (use less energy) using tools they’re already excited about (Games. Virtual badges. Facebook!). Nothing more, nothing less.

Simple Energy, now 18 months old, thinks they’ll get it to a point where people in different cities, and under different utilities, can engage and compete with each other. (Right now, you can only compete against others who share your service area.) There are a few obstacles between here and there: How do you create an even playing field across different climate zones, or how will you handicap players with access to abundant hydropower?

Still, cross-country competitions could come sooner rather than later. Lurie said they’ve already spoken with hundreds of utilities who are waiting to see how their current partnerships turn out. “The need is great,” he says.

Coller said it’s too soon to tell if SDG&E will continue or expand their program after this summer, but she made it clear that Simple Energy is a valuable part of the efficiency equation.

And if other users react like the Faunces have, there’s no doubt it can have an impact on individual habits. Faunce doesn’t see his grandparents enrolling in a Simple Energy program, but for people open to new technology, he thinks it’s an easy sell.

“People are competitive and we’re competitive — it’s kind of what helped us win,” he said. And victory brings much more than bragging rights: Since starting the program, the Faunces have saved nearly $2,000 a year on energy costs. With results like that, it’s not hard to imagine everyone wanting to play.

Yesterday, we wrote about the outrageously ridiculous amounts of energy Americans spend air conditioning things (cars, houses, themselves, cats).

Today, a report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) tells us that America has one of the least energy-efficient major economies in the world.

From the ACEEE’s press release:

The United Kingdom comes in first in a new energy efficiency ranking of the world’s major economies, followed closely by Germany, Italy, and Japan, according to the first-ever International Energy Efficiency Scorecard published today by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). The report finds that in the last decade the U.S. has made “limited or little progress toward greater efficiency at the national level,” putting it in 9th place out of 12 economies around the globe. …

On a scale of 100 possible points in 27 categories, the nations were ranked by ACEEE as follows: (1) the United Kingdom; (2) Germany; (3) Italy; (4) Japan; (5) France; (6) the European Union, Australia, and China (3-way tie); (9) the U.S.; (10) Brazil; (11) Canada; and (12) Russia.

Click to embiggen.

Ha ha Canada.

For those who want to decrease energy use and carbon emissions, energy efficiency has long offered the most promise for doing so quickly and at low cost. (See: Roberts, Dave.) A 2007 report by McKinsey and Company [PDF] developed a chart (below) comparing the cost of economic shifts to the potential for greenhouse gas reduction. In the chart, strategies to the left are cheaper, while the width of the bar indicates the emissions reduction. Most of the cheapest strategies revolve around efficiency.

Click to embiggen.

A second McKinsey report in 2009 suggested that improved efficiency could save $1.2 trillion by 2020.

Today’s report from the ACEEE provides a helpful list of recommendations that mirror the above curve, offering ways the United States can increase its energy efficiency. House Republicans are currently reading them out loud to each other and laughing, laughing, laughing.

Rep. Mike Conaway (R–Texas) hates the Navy’s biofuel program. “It’s not about proving the technology,” he told Reuters. “It’s [Navy Secretary Ray] Mabus wanting to waste money … on a publicity stunt for his green fleet.” Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) hates it too. “I don’t believe it’s the job of the Navy to be involved in building … new technologies. I don’t believe we can afford it.”

How does the Navy respond? Cool story, bro.

The Navy has been at the forefront of energy innovation for over a hundred years, Mabus says, transitioning from sail, to coal, to oil and then to nuclear from the 1850s to the 1950s.

“Every single time there were naysayers,” he said recently. “And every single time, every single time, those naysayers have been wrong, and they’re going to be wrong again this time.”

Earlier this month, the Navy announced a $62 million investment in biofuel technology. David Roberts has been covering this issue for a long time, noting that such investments in biofuels make an enormous amount of sense over the long term. As Mabus points out, the Navy uses 2 percent of all of the fossil fuels consumed in the United States. In 2011, the Daily Energy Report posted the breakdown of military energy consumption from 2009, below. That year, the military used 731 trillion British thermal units of oil.

Click to embiggen.

Now, the Navy is bringing its focus on reducing its energy consumption onshore. Reuters reports:

The Navy unveiled a major update of its energy policies ashore on Tuesday, calling for improved efficiency, greater conservation and increased use of renewable power to cut energy consumption in half at bases worldwide by the end of the decade. …

The Navy has established a goal of cutting its power consumption in installations ashore in half by 2020. The Navy also wants half of its energy to come from renewable sources by the end of the decade, and it wants half of its installations to be net-zero consumers of energy by then. …

“I can’t overemphasize how important the culture change piece is,” [Vice Admiral Phil] Cullom said. “You’re trying to change the attitudes and the views of hundreds of thousands of people … so that what they do on board ship is what they do at home.”

If we’re to track the culture change, then, it started with Navy brass, has trickled out into the fleet, and will soon be onshore.

Give it a few more years, it might actually reach Capitol Hill.

The best cinema taps into our secret dreams, and TINY taps in specifically to our secret dreams about running away to Colorado and building a tiny house. Thus, we think it’s reasonable to assume it’ll be bigger than Avengers.

TINY chronicles filmmaker Christopher Smith’s attempt to build a tiny house more or less from scratch.

Smith directed the movie and Merete Mueller, who will also live in the house, wrote and produced it. They’re both quite charming, and to get a sense of both their ambitions and their learning process, consider this bit from the blog chronicling the project:

In case you’re new to this project, here’s some important background info:
1: Neither Christopher or I have any building experience whatsoever.
2: We did not use any plans in the building of this house. Christopher pretty much figured it out/ made it all up as he went along.

Is it a spoiler to say they end up with a house at the end of the movie? Though you may have to wait for the sequel to find out whether it collapses immediately.

Baseball fans will gladly tell you why tonight’s All-Star Game doesn’t matter. Even when the Bud Selig-tie-game debacle led to a contest that determined which league played host during the World Series (basically always the American League) it didn’t make a whole lot of difference to the outcome.

So here’s something that matters anyway: The All-Star Game is very, very green.

Very green. So green, uneaten hot dogs will be composted.

The Royals, in conjunction with Missouri Organic Waste, will divert organic waste from food prep and from the suites to composting. Uneaten food will be collected and donated to Harvesters.

So green, the toilet paper is made from recycled paper.

Paper products in the restrooms contain post-recycled content such as the toilet paper (30% post-consumer) and paper towels (up to 73% post-consumer).

So green, the power used in the stadium will be offset.

120,000 KWh of energy used during the All-Star Game and related events, including the Home Run Derby, the Legends & Celebrity Softball Game and the All-Star Futures Game will be offset with Green-e Certified Renewable Energy Credits supplied by Bonneville Environmental Foundation.

So green, the stadium had solar panels installed.

In advance of the All-Star Game, the Royals and KCP&L installed on Kauffman Stadium 120 solar panels that will produce 36,000 kw/annually.

So green, viewers at home will know how green it is.

This thing is so chock-full of green that the MLB’s partners at the Natural Resources Defense Council have a blog post loaded with the partnerships, offsets, changes, additions, upgrades, products, and details of how in-your-face, green-to-the-max baseball’s night of honor is going to be.

They may not have put too much thought into doing the right thing when it comes to the National League’s starting pitcher (R. A. Dickey was robbed!), but at least they’re trying to do the right thing for the environment. At the very least, the planet Earth will be a winner tonight.

Also, hopefully, the American League.

EPEAT (the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) is a national standard (funded in part by the EPA) that certifies electronic products as “environmentally preferable.” Among other things, EPEAT considers energy consumption and recyclability in awarding products one of three levels of certification.

Last week, all of Apple’s desktop and laptop computers were certified as EPEAT Gold. Today, none of the company’s products appear on the index at all.

From the Wall Street Journal:

In order to meet the standards, recyclers need to be able to easily disassemble products, with common tools, to separate toxic components, like batteries. The standards were created jointly by manufacturers, including Apple, advocacy groups and government agencies. Frisbee says an Apple staff member told him at the end of June that the company no longer wanted Apple computers to be listed as EPEAT certified.

“They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements,” Frisbee said. The company did not elaborate, Frisbee said. “They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.”

IFixit.com suspects that design changes seen in the new MacBook are to blame.

It’s no coincidence that the decision came just weeks after the release of the very-difficult-to-repair MacBook Pro with Retina Display. When we tore it down last month, we noticed that EPEAT certification was quietly left out of Apple’s marketing material. Even the environmental report for the new 15-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro, which is not much changed from last year’s model, no longer mentions EPEAT at all. …

When we originally tore down the Retina MacBook Pro, we could not separate the battery from the upper case. The next day, after a lot of elbow grease, we were finally able to get them apart—but in the process punctured the battery, leaking hazardous goo all over.

The problem, iFixit suspects, is that the glued-on batteries (and other components) make it much harder for recyclers to separate out components for reuse.

Apple’s products remain certified on other standards, such as with the EPA’s Energy Star program. And the company touts its green credentials on its “Apple and the Environment” page — itself in part a response to a campaign by Greenpeace several years ago. (Greenpeace currently rates the company as the fourth-greenest computer manufacturer.)

The decision could have an economic impact for the company. Again, from the Journal:

Many corporations like Ford, HSBC, and Kaiser Permanente require their CIOs to purchase computers from sources that are EPEAT certified, said Sarah O’Brien director of outreach for EPEAT. And the U.S. government requires that 95% of the electronics it purchases be EPEAT certified.

Apple will probably manage to survive.

It really would be interesting to find out what moral calculus goes into Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s environmental decisions. It must go something like “I’m a big city mayor, working hard to draw down emissions on a municipal scale. Therefore, it is 100 percent justifiable that in my personal life, I fly regularly to the Bahamas and use A/C units intended for a whole apartment to keep my SUV a comfortable temperature.”

Because that’s what he had his staff do this week: take a standard room air conditioner and try sticking it into the window of an SUV. The New York Post reports:

If the strange plan gets a green light, the units would be plugged into electrical outlets and cause less pollution than running the vehicles’ own A/Cs on an idling engine.

The mayor’s two Chevy Suburbans have been on cooling restriction since July 2009, when reporters spotted them all around town idling with the A/Cs on for several minutes at a time.

Bloomberg quickly apologized for the gaffe and ordered his security detail to obey the city’s three-minute idling restriction.

Bloomberg’s spokesman argued that this plan would emit less greenhouse gas than cooling down the SUV using only the engine. We have an alternative idea: Suck it up, like the rest of us. Or buy these shirts.

An iPad costs you at least $400. That’s for an older model; the latest version runs up to $830. And that doesn’t include the data plan. Depending on your carrier and options, you could be paying another $50 a month. So for a year, the high-end iPad with the most expensive data plan will run you over $1,400.

On top of that, you have to charge the thing. According to a study from the Electric Power Research Institute, adding the cost of powering your $1,400 investment brings your annual total up to … $1,401.36.

Consumers who fully charge their iPad tablet every other day can expect to pay $1.36 for the electricity needed annually to power the device, according to an  assessment by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

The analysis shows that each model of the iPad consumes less than 12 kWh of electricity over the course of a year, based on a full charge every other day. By comparison, a plasma 42” television consumes 358 kWh of electricity a year.

They also tested other electronic devices.

The EPRI analysis shows that the Apple iPhone 3G consumes 2.2 kWh of electricity each year, which results in a power cost of $.25 annually.

Other products that were included in the analysis were laptop PCs, which consume 72.3 kWh of electricity each year and cost consumers $8.31 and 60W CFL light bulbs which consume approximately 14 kWh of electricity and cost consumers $1.61 a year.

The light bulb data is remarkable. In other words, CFLs are $6.70 cheaper to run on an annual basis. This isn’t some crazy, if-you-left-it-on-24-7-365 scenario, either — it’s actual use. Multiply that $6.70 by 20 (or however many light bulbs you have in your house) and the difference is pretty stark.

I mean, that’s $130 that you could be spending buying Apple products. On installment.

He’s wrong.

Lane bases his arguments largely on a report released earlier this month by Brookings. “Clean Energy: Revisiting the Challenges of Industrial Policy” assesses the value of subsidies in bolstering a clean energy economy.

What Brookings found probably won’t come as much of a surprise: Subsidizing clean energy initiatives is not always effective and is not the ideal way to bolster the sector. Instead of subsidies, the most market-efficient way to support clean energy is to internalize the costs of fossil fuel-based energy production. In other words, to build a system that — among other things — ends the ability of coal power producers to emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere where they will produce long-term costs in global warming and negative health impacts.

We tried this one way; it was called cap-and-trade. It was proposed by Republicans, then killed when Democrats began to champion it. Politically, it’s a non-starter.

There’s another way to do it: regulation. The EPA has issued several rules that would lower the allowable baseline for fossil fuel pollution. This is the sort of reception such efforts receive.

Which is why the fossil fuel industry and its allies focus on subsidies as a target. Subsidies are the primary support the government provides to clean energy. If you remove subsidies for clean energy projects, it’s almost impossible for them to get a foothold in a crowded marketplace — even if, over the long run, the technology will obviously be dominant and more cost-effective. If you came up with a new retail system, one that held real promise to vastly improve the consumer experience, how do you think you’d do if Walmart wanted to take you out?

But, as yesterday’s Twitterstorm noted, subsidies don’t only go to clean energy companies. Here’s a graphic from the Brookings report that shows where subsidies for research and development have gone over the past 40 years.

Click to embiggen. (Image courtesy of Brookings.)

See that spike in the second small graph? Fossil fuels received far more research and development subsidies during the second big spike than did clean energy projects. Imagine if your little store was trying to compete with Walmart and the government was giving Walmart far more money than you.

Subsidies for clean energy may not be the most efficient. But if we want to position the United States as a leader in the emerging clean energy sector, we can’t let existing energy systems both kill research and development for clean energy and block attempts to internalize their own costs. Or, at the very least, we should maybe give them less money to do so.

The Post’s Lane doesn’t broach the subject of fossil fuel subsidies; presumably, in his eyes, throwing government money at the feet of some of the world’s wealthiest companies to do research is a perfectly sensible investment. As for cleantech?

Having China or someone else develop clean-energy technology might be to U.S. advantage; let them pay the inevitable start-up costs; then we can adapt the discoveries to our own needs.

Lane suggests we just play catch-up.

Now that’s a smart investment strategy.

Bad news, coal. A massive study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) modeled the impacts of a national energy grid with renewable power comprising between 30 and 90 percent of the mix — including the requisite generation, transmission, and storage. In short:

The central conclusion of the analysis is that renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the United States.

That quote scratches the surface of the NREL’s findings, which follow collaboration with 110 contributors from 35 organizations inside and outside the government. (The list of abbreviations used in the report itself runs two-and-a-half pages.) Another study released in 2010 found that Europe could similarly make a transition to a renewable-heavy energy infrastructure.

The United States currently generates 3.6 percent of our energy from renewable, non-hydroelectric sources, meaning that a target of 80 percent renewable generation by 2050 seems, well, optimistic. Even if the political will for such a transition existed — which it very much does not, as reinforced by those turnpike billboards — such a shift would require a massive investment and shift in energy economics. But it’s by no means impossible.

While this analysis suggests such a high renewable generation future is possible, a transformation of the electricity system would need to occur to make this future a reality. This transformation, involving every element of the grid, from system planning through operation, would need to ensure adequate planning and operating reserves, increased flexibility of the electric system, and expanded multi-state transmission infrastructure, and would likely rely on the development and adoption of technology advances, new operating procedures, evolved business models, and new market rules.

In short: daunting.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t note the most broadly engaging aspect of the NREL’s findings: the projection maps.

The animation above is an inelegant representation of the NREL report’s animated map of possible growth of renewable energy over the next 38 years. More amazing: an hour-by-hour look at energy flow in the year 2050. Watching these provides more than a little sense of living in a world of science fiction. But the more important point is what they demonstrate. We can build the renewable energy we need and even project how it will work in a national grid.

Even in 2050, the NREL projection indicates, coal has a role. But it’s unlikely our self-driving cars will pass any billboards touting it.

Other findings from the full report [PDF]:

• Electricity supply and demand can be balanced in every hour of the year in each region with nearly 80 percent electricity from renewable resources, including nearly 50 percent from variable renewable generation, according to simulations of 2050 power system operations.

• High renewable electricity futures can result in deep reductions in electric sector greenhouse gas emissions and water use.

• The direct incremental cost associated with high renewable generation is comparable to published cost estimates of other clean energy scenarios. Improvement in the cost and performance of renewable technologies is the most impactful lever for reducing this incremental cost.

• With higher demand growth, high levels of renewable generation present increased resource and grid integration challenges.